The second Northern Ballad has been rarely heard since its first performance in 1946 (12 years after its composition) and in a way one can see why: it is hard, stormy, troubled music, as different as can be from the ornate opulence of Bax's earlier tone-poems. But it is powerful and grippingly inventive stuff; an onrush of boldly juxtaposed ideas, seething with bitter discontent, either a musical evocation of a bleak, wind- and wave-beaten landscape or of a state of mind for which such a landscape might serve as a metaphor. There are lulls in the cold wind of the piece, moments of calm and warmth, but these lyrical promises are transitory and even what appears to be an exultant conclusion, triumphing over the storm, is ambiguously questioned in the coda. Yet the Ballad is no mere stream of undisciplined emotional images: Bax's remarkable ability to transform the emotional temperature of his ideas by subtle changes of orchestral colour (as changing light can transform a landscape from serene to threatening, from limpid green to ominous grey) is here combined with tight thematic economy and an impressively cogent structure. It is a most important addition to the Bax discography and receives a performance of great power and refinement.
Spring Fire, another long-neglected piece (it was written in 1913 but not performed until 1970, more than a decade after Bax's death) is much earlier, much longer and much more rhapsodic. In form it is a loose sort of symphony, with a first movement evoking the awakening of a forest at a dawn (a fine, rather Russian-sounding, but at the same time thoroughly baxian tune as 'first subject', much sumptuous and varied colour and some beautifully delicate woodland murmurings), a scherzo alternating wild energy and breathless quiet (Bax's orchestra here suggests temperature as well as colour: this is hot music, with an unclouded sun directly overhead), a voluptuous, almost static, rather Scriabin-like slow movement and a long dance-finale. For me the texture of the music is almost lost under luxuriant embroidery in the slow movement, while in the last the combination of a rather lumpish rhythm (a slowed-down tarantella, basically) and an excessive number of drawn-out, heavily-scored climaxes make for an unsatisfying culmination, despite many incidental beauties, but the first two movements, heard on their own, add up to a vintage early Bax tone-poem, a landscape to set beside the seascape of The Garden of Fand.
The Symphonic Scherzo, an orchestrated movement from an abandoned piano sonata, is of less interest: the orchestral colouring is as richly brocaded as ever (and, as in Spring Fire, it is finely rendered by Handley and his orchestra) but the thematic framework here is disappointingly slight; it sounds like an extended prelude to, or episode within, some larger work. The best music here, however, is so good that the record must be warmly welcomed. The sound is splendidly clear and rich.'